A Fable of Tomorrows is a speculative design installation designed by Sarah Edmands Martin consisting of digital and interactive objects, at the center of which is a fable from the future. First installed at the MediaCity Innovation Hub in the United Kingdom in 2024, the piece lives on virtually, here.
Accompanying a phantasmagoric panorama that immerses viewers in signifiers of deep time, a mysterious artifact poses an Old English riddle. Each solution to the riddles unveils a fragment of a mysterious fable, which unfurls at an increasingly exponential duration of time. It is said that solving for the entire fable takes about 1.5x human lifetimes. Additionally, every engagement with the riddles contributes to the dynamic construction of a player-driven archive, the ghosts of which reappear during continued play.
This work meditates on memory, digital computation, and temporality, exploring how a long durée of time can be mediated through play. It also considers the impact of design artifacts on the sociocultural imaginary and how these artifacts might better serve collective futures.
CONTACT:
Sarah Edmands Martin
306 Riley Hall of Art
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA
(574) 631-7602
A Fable of Tomorrows is supported by a United States Fulbright, the University of Notre Dame's Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, and the University of Notre Dame's Nanovic Institute.
© Sarah Edmands Martin 2024
This project is a collaboration between Sarah Edmands Martin and Anonymous.
Sarah Edmands Martin is an Assistant Professor of Visual Communication Design at the University of Notre Dame (U.S.) whose work takes place at the intersection of visual communication design, critical fabulation, and media aesthetics. Read more about her work here.
Anonymous is from a time yet to come. They do not have hope for the future but nevertheless believe that futures (plural) are a time from which the surprising and the unaccountable can arrive. They have always found that entire worlds emerge in the uncertain time between when a riddle is asked and when it is solved. Though they admire the likes of Aesop and Jean de La Fontaine, they prefer fables that come from a nameless void. Contrary to a theory that has circulated in very minor artistic subcultures, Anonymous is not merely a discursive author function. They are a real person who prefers words, images, and play to institutions, prestige economics, and proper nouns. They will have worked closely with Sarah Edmands Martin for many years.
16 Roland Barthes writes in Image, Music, Text, the "text means Tissue; but whereas hitherto we have always taken this tissue as a product, a ready-made veil, behind which lies, more or less hidden, meaning (truth), we are now emphasizing, in the tissue, the generative idea that the text is made, is worked out in a perpetual interweaving; lost in this tissue – this texture – the subject unmakes himself, like a spider dissolving in the constructive secretions of its web." Barthes, Roland., and Heath, Stephen. Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana Press, 1987.
This could be an ending, if you so choose. There are more riddles in this game, but perhaps you are tired of play and have work to do. If you want to end your play time, you can receive an ending to our fable. This is not the true ending, of course, as that can only be discovered through time. Nevertheless, you have a choice. Know, however, that an ending here is an irreversible decision and your time will be forfeit. Would you like to keep playing, or end your play time now?